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Is garbage day this week or next? Sign up for garbage day email reminders and a chance to win a $100 credit on your garbage bill

The City of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability recently announced a new contest to promote its garbage collection day email reminders. For every 1,000 Portland residents who go to www.garbagedayreminders.com to sign up for the free email reminders, the City will hold a drawing to select winners to receive a prize of a $100 garbage bill credit.

The contest is open to all single-family and smallplex (two- to four-unit) households and runs from today through March 1, 2014, or until ten winners are selected. To sign up for the reminders and be automatically entered for a chance to win, visit www.garbagedayreminders.com.

The collection day email reminder system was developed by the City of Portland as a resource for residents to help take the guesswork out of which containers to set out on collection day. The free, simple reminders are delivered to the resident’s email the afternoon prior to collection day. To date, over 6,000 households are registered to use the email tool. The goal of the contest is to increase that number to 17,000 registered households.

“It’s one less thing to try to remember every week. I signed up for the weekly reminders because I got tired of going out to the street in my pajamas to see which containers my neighbors set out,” said John Vincent Lovell, a Northeast Portland resident. “Now, I get a short email the afternoon before pickup day, set out my containers and I don’t think about it again until the reminder comes the next week.”

When residents sign up at www.garbagedayreminders.com, they can also find information about what goes into each container, how-to videos on composting and more.

“Congratulations to Portlanders for reaching a 70 percent recycling rate citywide,” said Charlie Hales, mayor of Portland. “These email reminders are one more way to make green choices even easier.”

It has been two years since Portlanders started adding food scraps to yard debris in the green Portland Composts roll cart and switched to every-other-week garbage collection. Almost 80 percent of Portland households are adding their food scraps to the green roll cart, which is converted into nutrient-rich compost that is used by local farmers and community gardens. Since the start of the program, 156,000 tons of food scraps and yard debris have been collected and household garbage headed to the landfill has decreased by an additional 37 percent.